The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

**UPDATED – Scroll to bottom of post**

Knowing who your real parents are is one of the most essential needs of any child. This is a fact that oftentimes gets lost in our cosmopolitan world that suggest that anybody or anything can fill that space. Fortunately the voices of some of those children (who are now adults) are starting to get much needed press in their search for their fathers.

The following is one of two articles that I will feature on this site between today and tomorrow.

(spiegel.de) Anthöfer wasn’t the only soldier’s son in the orphanages of the young Federal Republic. West German politicians worried vocally about a minority growing there “for whom our social climate is not suitable,” as a CDU-member put it in a 1952 Bundestag debate: Mixed-race children, often of African-American GI fathers.

Called “Negermischlinge” (“Negro half-breeds”) by neighbors and social welfare agencies, these children faced all the prejudices their white counterparts did, and more. They were nearly three times as likely to be given up for adoption, and rarely found German adoptive families. Their mothers were ostracized, and in some cases fired from their jobs and disowned by their families. Few of these women could hope to marry their children’s fathers; until 1948, the American Army was legally segregated, and interracial marriage was forbidden.

Mabel Grammer, wife of a US officer stationed in Mannheim, decided to do something about the plight of these “brown babies.” The childless couple took in 12 children themselves, and drew on social and professional contacts to pair some 500 others with African-American adoptive families in the States.

Daniel Cardwell is one of them. Born in Marburg in 1950, he was adopted at age three by a black Army couple who took in a total of five Afro-German toddlers. In the family’s Washington, DC, home, the children were forbidden to speak German. “I had to say my food in English before I could eat it,” Cardwell says. They were also discouraged from asking questions about their pasts. It wasn’t until college that Cardwell began looking for answers. (more…)

If you think this is sad, make sure you are near a box of tissues for the article featured tomorrow.

Please read these articles in their entirety when you get a chance.

**Related articles for additional research

1- Mandatory Sterilization for Black Youth

Prior to World War I, there were very few dark-skinned people of African descent in Germany. But, during World War I, black African soldiers were brought in by the French during the Allied occupation. Most of the Germans, who were very race conscious, despised the dark-skinned “invasion”. Some …(more)

2- Q: Post War “German Brown Babies” enter the U.S.A. (more…)